The disclosed embodiments relate generally to methods and apparatus for determining or predicting the relevance of matches between entities.
Match-making systems refer to systems that enable users to meet other users to satisfy a particular need. Many match-making systems exist today including dating services, resume/job bulletin boards, community-based question answering systems, and consumer-to-consumer marketplaces. One fundamental component of match-making systems is the retrieval and ranking of candidate matches for a given user.
Typically, in a match-making system, each user is associated with a profile that includes general information about the user. For example, in an online dating service, the profile may include the user's location, physical attributes (e.g., hair color), age, and gender. On a job seeking site, the profile may contain the job seeker's education, years of experience, and desired salary range. It is also common for users of these systems to be able to define the attributes they would like matches to satisfy. In match-making systems, these are often called target profiles. In information retrieval terminology, the target profile can be considered the user's information need, or query.
Despite the popularity of such systems, match-making systems often provide matches that are based solely on the target profile, yielding results that are less than optimal. As a result, the users of such systems are often unsatisfied with these match-making systems.